navy-blue swim cap and a one-piece bathing suit and diligently motored through
her laps, stopping once in a while to take advice from the coaches, chatting
merrily with her teammates during the prescribed breaks.
For me, there was nothing more gratifying than being a bystander in these
moments, to sit barely noticed by the people around me and witness the miracle
of a girl—our girl—growing independent and whole. We had thrust our
daughters into all the strangeness and intensity of White House life, not knowing
how it would impact them or what they’d take from the experience. I tried to
make our daughters’ exposure to the wider world as positive as possible, realizing
that Barack and I had a unique opportunity to show them history up close. When
Barack had foreign trips that coincided with school vacations, we traveled as a
family, knowing it would be educational. In the summer of 2009, we’d brought
them on a trip that included visits to the Kremlin in Moscow and the Vatican in
Rome. In the span of seven days, they’d met the Russian president, toured the
Pantheon and the Roman Colosseum, and passed through the “Door of No
Return” in Ghana, the departure point for untold numbers of Africans who’d
been sold into slavery.
Surely it was a lot for them to process, but I was learning that each child
took in what she could and from her own perspective. Sasha had returned home
from our summer travels to start third grade. Walking around her classroom at
Sidwell’s parents’ night that fall, I’d come across a short “What I Did on My
Summer Vacation” essay she’d authored, hanging alongside those of her
classmates on one of the walls. “I went to Rome and I met the Pope,” Sasha had
written. “He was missing part of his thumb.”
I could not tell you what Pope Benedict XVI’s thumb looks like, whether
some part of it isn’t there. But we’d taken an observant, matter-of-fact eight-
year-old to Rome, Moscow, and Accra, and this is what she’d brought back. Her
view of history was, at that point, waist-high.
As much as we tried to create a buffer between them and the more fraught
aspects of Barack’s job, I knew that Sasha and Malia still had a lot to take in. They
coexisted with world events in a way that few children did, living with the fact
that news occasionally unfolded right under our roof, that their father got called
away sometimes for national emergencies, and that always and no matter what
there’d be some part of the population that openly reviled him. For me, this was
another version of the lions and cheetahs feeling sometimes very close by.
Over the course of the winter of 2011, we’d been hearing news that the